Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

There’s a new Perl blog in town

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! One of the things I’ve been doing, in my current state of unemployment, is pondering the world of Perl blogs.

A month or so back, I happened to google for perl blogs and found almost nothing of use on [...]

BarCampBlock: Session notes roundup

A number of people have been blogging about sessions at BarCampBlock. There are plenty of session notes on the wiki, but I thought I’d link a few of the people who are posting about specific sessions they attended or ran.

I blogged two myself:

Why is Programming Hard? with Kragen Sitaker:

Here’s some of [...]

BarCampBlock: Review roundup

Lots of other people are talking about BarCampBlock. Here’s a link roundup. I’ll add to it as more stuff becomes available.

Jordan Sissel:

After two days of meeting new friends, catching up with others, a blitz of demos, piles of sessions, food, and drink, I’m pretty beat. As Tara put it in [...]

BarCampBlock: The Grid

BarCampBlock, like all BarCamps, is an unconference. That means there’s no set schedule, and that participants collaboratively come up with one on the first morning of the event.

I found myself a good position and took photos of “the grid” every so often over the weekend. The first photo is from about 9am [...]

Why is programming hard?

I’m at BarCampBlock sitting in a session by Kragen Sitaker on “Why is programming hard?” We’re mostly just going round the group and trying to come up with a list of answers to that question.

Photo by Beatrice Murch

Here’s some of what’s on the board:

Gulf of evaluation Gulf of execution Impatience (but not the Larry Wall [...]

At BlockCamp

I’m at BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, and things are just about to kick off. More coverage to follow!

Freebase: crack for information nerds

I have discovered something more crack-like than Wikipedia.

Freebase is a collection of user-contributed and -edited data about everything. Like Wikipedia, you can put just about anything in there. Unlike Wikipedia, you don’t just provide text, but can provide structured data. For instance, for a topic of type “person”, there are fields [...]

Wiki Wednesday: Yoz Grahame on “Folk Logic”

[ Not quite live-blogged from Wiki Wednesday at Citizen Space; I took notes live, then kind of cleaned them up. ]

Yoz Grahame is apparently my long-lost twin, at least judging by the violence of my nodding all through his talk.

He launched his talk on “Folk Logic” — how people learn to [...]

Gmail tip: the “unsubscribed” tag

I get a lot of acquaintance spam. Companies I once dealt with keep sending me stuff I don’t want. Websites where I signed up for an account years ago keep telling me stuff I don’t care about. There are people in Ottawa, Canada, who still seem to think I want to [...]

The Password Solution

For many years now I’ve been using STRIP, the Secure Tool for Recalling Important Passwords, on my Palm Pilot to store passwords for websites and other important information like bank account numbers.

The time has come for a change, mostly because I want to minimise the number of devices I carry around. This is [...]